Poppies Will Make You Sleep

Aleah Sato

It's February
and she is not herself again.
There is always a man
and he is almost always older.
His figure shifts.
He is amorphous.
Sometimes she wants to scratch
rip
tear
screech
like the owls in the woods where she used to camp.
Screech like there's no reason to think twice,
like it's as natural as breathing.
But her voice stops in its trap,
stops and clogs in the voice box.
She is tired of writing about men.
She is tired of writing about men who are cruel.
Instead,
she would prefer to write about beauty;
something beautiful that others go on about,
but she's mysteriously blind to –
Tobacco stains,
missing teeth,
gasoline vapors and the foot
found beneath a train
without its body.

She is a tease because she never says
NO.
She is a tease because she never really hears your rusty voice,
only the orchestrated screams of those owls.

Rubies smash in her throat.
How she wants to scream and
smash against your head like the rubies.

But
tonight she comforts the man who catches rabbits
in barbed wire traps –
the way their fur gets caught and how they play dead –
she lies still beneath him.
And when she laughs,
she sees an old man hissing in the corner –
You like that, don't you?
You like it when I call you bitch.
You like it when a priest falls to sin.
You like it when you are tired of explaining
why some women like it
rough.

It is February
and she knows that she is someone else,
but the danger's in her scent
and all she knows is how to pretend –
her eyes shining,
paralyzed in barbed wire,
lying still beneath him.